Columns

Parental silence is letting porn steal children’s minds

Last week Sue Berelowitz, the deputy children’s commissioner, described
Britain as a country where young girls are lured to parks by boys they have
met online and gang raped, adding that “there isn’t a town, village or
hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”. Her
remarks, made to the House of Commons home affairs select committee, were
the most dramatic in a morning of evidence from experts being asked about
the ramifications of the ghastly cases in Rochdale, where a group of
predominantly British Pakistani men were convicted of sexually trafficking
and assaulting white teenage girls.

The details of the girls being plied with booze and drugs and then carted
around the north of England to be serially raped were gruesome, but what I
found particularly shocking was how, despite the assaults, the girls
involved kept attending school and often considered some of the men involved
to be